I welcome the news that an information tribunal has ordered the government to release key Iraq War cabinet minutes.

I welcome the news that an information tribunal has ordered the government to release key Iraq War cabinet minutes ("Advice to Blair on going to war in Iraq must be revealed'", January 28). It was not until May 2005 that the contents of the Downing Street Memorandum (DSM) of July 23, 2002, were publicised by an American journalist, Mark Danner, in the New York Review of Books. The DSM is classically what Danner calls a "frozen scandal", ie, a seminal event whose severely delayed (and often unwelcome publication) means its impact is dissipated, which is followed by the declension, we have "moved on", a mechanism that Mr Blair, a man in perpetual motion, might be said to have made his own.

The DSM truly consigns the Hutton and Butler reports to the dustbin of history, although they were always pretty thin stuff even at the time of their publication in 2004 - Tam Dalyell called Hutton "worthy of the Booker prize for fiction", while Butler was not allowed to use crucial US intelligence data.

However, it was the DSM which enshrined the injunction that "from now on the intelligence and facts would be fixed around the policy". George W Bush and Mr Blair knew from April 2002 onwards - nearly a year before the invasion of Iraq - that the fairy tales around weapons of mass destruction were known to be precisely that, and that the casus belli was "regime change", even though we were told it was about ridding Saddam of his WMD alone.

Late last year Lord Bingham, former Lord Chief Justice, said invading Iraq was a serious violation of international law. It was certainly based on a lie or on a sequence of lies encompassing "sexy" dossiers solemnly presented to Parliament in September 2002 and February 2003. It's time to remove Iraq from the permafrost in an Age of Frozen Scandal.

I endorse Lord Bingham's analysis and conclusion. A full-scale inquiry is now imperative and further prevarication by the Prime Minister would be morally offensive and politically unwise.
Chris Walker, West Kilbride.